


green lilac park

by SharkEnthusiast



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (said lovingly), Allison Hargreeves Deserves the World, Allison Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Diego Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Diego Hargreeves is Bad at Feelings, Diego Hargreeves-centric, F/M, Gen, Good Sibling Diego Hargreeves, Hurt Diego Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves Deserves Better, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Klaus Hargreeves is a Brat, Protective Diego Hargreeves, Vanya Hargreeves Deserves Better, Vanya Hargreeves Needs A Hug, i would die for her :), the hargreeves need hugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24683485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharkEnthusiast/pseuds/SharkEnthusiast
Summary: The night is dark and deep and he is tired and guilty and sorry.Diego, the laundromat, a cat, and his siblings.
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Ben Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves & Diego Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Allison Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Eudora Patch, Diego Hargreeves & Grace Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Luther Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & The Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch, Eudora Patch & Klaus Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves & Everyone, Klaus Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 37
Kudos: 327





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, I just want to remind everyone to stay safe, whether in terms of corona virus or the protests.   
> This is almost entirely Diego angst because weirdly, he's my favorite (sorry Klaus), and there has been a severe lack of Diego content recently.

Diego used to sleep with his lights on. He doesn’t now because he has bills to pay and floors to mop and knives to throw. But he used to, because the night is dark and deep and the Umbrella Academy used to spend their missions getting rid of the things that came out of it. 

A lot of things have changed. He makes dinner for himself, buys his own groceries. He cleans the gym when he can, and when the hot water stops working, Diego gets out a wrench and starts banging at the boiler. 

The worst thing, though, about being a semi-functioning adult is laundry. Mom used to do all of it- wash  _ and _ dry  _ and _ fold  _ and _ place them into each of the kid's drawers. But Diego left her, along with the rest of his siblings, and so now he has to deal with scrubbing blood stains out of his clothing and then dragging them to the laundromat. 

He fucking  _ hates _ the laundromat. 

It’s a Tuesday, and the knuckles on his left hand are bleeding enough for it to drip off his fingers and onto the floor. He wraps them, careful, rips the gauze with his teeth. His hands are shaking from adrenaline, and his ribs hurt. 

He gets reflective on nights like these when it’s been bad enough that Diego allows himself some self-pity. When the ever-present anger fades into something worse, something quieter and darker. 

Eudora’s voice echoes in his head. 

_ You can’t keep doing this. You’re going to get yourself killed. _

He’s still doing it. It has been a year and a half since he got kicked out of the police academy and started doing this, and he’s not dead yet.

(Diego misses her like a limb.)

He’s got 2 weeks worth of laundry piled up in the corner, so he’ll do that. He can’t dwell on what just happened or everything will collapse in on him, everything will fall apart, will drown him in all of it. His heart is pounding. His hands are still shaking. 

Yeah. He’ll do his laundry at the COIN O RAMA 4 blocks away, and everything will be okay.

He doesn’t own a hamper, so he grabs a garbage bag. Driving at night makes him sad, makes him  _ less _ , so he’ll walk. It’s not that far, anyway, his ribs don’t really hurt that bad, and his way he can just keep an eye out on everything, too. Find people to save in dark alleys. 

_ Everything will be okay. _

The soles of his boots are wearing away, so much so that when his heels hit the ground, Diego can feel the millimeter of rubber in between him and concrete. 

Klaus would make fun of them, probably. They’re big- butt ugly too, leather scuffed from black to light grey, laces fraying at the ends. Klaus would talk about how personal style and keeping up your appearance is one of the most important things in the world, and Diego would probably be a dick about it, say something about how that’s pretty funny coming from a guy who gets most his clothing from dumpsters. 

Diego is an asshole. He knows this, but at least he’s fucking self-aware. 

His ribs ache. His hands are still shaking. 

_ Everything will be okay. _

He shouldn’t have allowed himself to think about Klaus. It makes him angry, makes him guilty, reduces him back to Number Two, back to the brand on his wrist, the scars and screams and stutter. 

He shouldn’t have gone out at all, ‘cause his knuckles are still bleeding, and the drawstring of the trash bag is cutting into his hands. Because it’s not just thinking of Klaus that makes him angry and guilty and sad. It’s the dark, the lack of things to do  _ but _ think, but wallow, but regret. 

Jesus, COIN O RAMA is further away than he thought, and it’s cold out. Cold enough to make his joints all stiff, cold enough to regret just wearing the sweater Mom knitted him and a pair of jeans that are ripped all the way down the thigh. ( _ “It’s not style, Klaus, it’s-” “Yeah, yeah, it’s the fact that you’re a total loser who carries knives and fights crime to deal with anger issues-” “What the fuck, man?!”) _

When they were little, Mom used to sit them all on the ground before bed and play music on the record player. It was always classical- Mozart's requiem, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Brahms and Bach and Paganini. Each night, she would pick one child to sit on her lap, and all the others would press against her, and they’d listen. The picking was always fair, just like it always was with Mom, from 1-7. It was nice though, and even if classical music is all stuffy and fancy and  _ Vanya _ , it reminds him of nights in the parlor, arms wrapped around him, violins, violas and cellos, pianos, piccolos, harps.

It stopped when they were 6. 

Christ. 

_ Everything will be okay. _

By the time Diego finally reaches the laundromat, his nose is all red from the cold, and the ache in his ribs has turned to throb. COIN O RAMA is empty except for an elderly woman who probably isn’t that old in actuality, a pissed-off looking college student and a tired-looking mom and her three kids. They’re playing some shitty EDM music through the speakers of a busted-up CD player with an obnoxious sticker slapped on it that Diego’s too far away from to read. It’s the kind of stuff they play at clubs, the kind of music that Klaus lives in, is made of.

Diego leans down, stops the hiss of pain from rising from his throat. He begins to shove his clothes into the washer, and it doesn’t matter that they stink like blood because there are only 5 other people in here, anyway, and it’s close to impossible to see bloodstains in black clothing. He straightens, brushes his banged-up knuckles against the edge of the dryer beside him- hisses for real this time. The college student eyes him, drags her eyes over him, focuses on the scar. She grabs her phone from her jacket pocket, and Diego can tell he freaks her out because her fingers twitch as she scrolls through her contacts for someone to call. 

He turns back to his laundry, throws the rest into the washer. Digs through his pockets for quarters, slides them into the slot, turns around to pick up the garbage bag. The college student is mumbling something into the phone about not sleeping for 2 days straight, and the elderly woman is flipping through a tabloid, and the kids of the mom are pestering her about ice cream, and the chime above the door dings and he turns to see who it is and-

“Diego,” Vanya says. 

“V,” he says back, stares. 

“Oh,” she says, and her face is something that Diego had almost forgotten. Forgotten the crease in her forehead, the sad eyes, how  _ small  _ she is, how she is swallowed in everything around her. “How are you?” she asks, walks carefully over, setting her laundry basket a few feet away. 

“Oh.” Her face is a map of everything he doesn’t want. A map of the mansion, the missions, the stern gaze, and cold eyes. “Uh, I’m good. Just doing my laundry.”

“How’s the violin thing?” He asks, and Vanya looks shocked that he even said anything to her at all. 

“It’s. Yeah. It’s good. I teach lessons and I’m in an orchestra? At the Icarus theater, just a couple blocks away.” 

Diego nods, like he knows where that is, rubs his hand up against the back in his head, shrugs. 

“How’s the police academy? Are you still doing that?” 

Diego eyes her, and tries to remember the last time he saw her. He can’t quite remember, because everything about Vanya is forgettable, always was. 

“Didn’t work out.” 

It’s an understatement. 

Diego watches as she piles her clothing into the washer. Watches her remove quarters from a light blue leather wallet with a star embroidered on the front, watches as she leans down, hair falling into her eyes, timid. 

She used to have bangs, and she’d always let them hang right over her eyes, and Diego always used to wonder why she wasn’t walking into walls all the time. 

It’s dark and cold and Diego is sorry, sad, guilty. Vanya is quiet, and so he is too, and the college student keeps talking and the children keep screaming, and the trashy EDM that reminds Diego of Klaus is still playing. 

Diego transfers his clothing into the dryer. 

“It’s late out,” he says, and Vanya hums underneath her breath. “Why are you up?”

“Couldn’t sleep, and the washer broke.”

“Just,” he starts, and he doesn’t like the way his tongue feels in his mouth, so he runs it over his teeth. “Just- stay safe, Vanya.”

“I’m okay on my own, Diego.”

“I know. Just. Here’s my number. In case.”

The timer for the dryer dings, and Diego leaves Vanya there holding a slip of paper with the number to the gym scribbled out on it, feeling tired and guilty and sorry. 

He crashes on the porch of Eudora’s house even though it’s all the way across town, and when he wakes, her travel mug is beside him and her hand is on his shoulder, shaking him awake. 

“You know, my roommates think you're creepy,” she says, and Diego groans as he sits up. His left hand is still wrapped with gauze, and his ribs still ache. 

“You have to stop doing this, Diego,” she continues, and something inside him pulls.

“I know.”

(He knows.) 


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diego finds the cat in a dumpster behind the gym, and when Al sees him with it he doesn’t bat an eye so Diego figures he should probably keep it. 
> 
> Diego gets a cat and almost cries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> give the hargreeves a cat 2020
> 
> also diego hargreeves deserves more from the fandom and that's just facts

Diego finds the cat in a dumpster behind the gym, and when Al sees him with it he doesn’t bat an eye so Diego figures he should probably keep it. 

He doesn’t really like cats, doesn’t really like animals in general, but this one has big pleading eyes and soft fur and he can’t just throw it out again,  _ goddamn it, _ so he after he’s done mopping the gym he calls Allison because she seems like the most likely of them all to know anything about something like this. 

“Diego,” she says once she picks up. She has other things to do, Diego knows, but the cat is scream meowing from its position on the floor and clawing at his legs so he can’t just hang up.

“Uh, hey. Do you know anything about cats? I just figured you probably had one cause you’re rich and shit.”

Allison is quiet, and Diego doesn’t know what he said wrong. 

“Do you-” she cuts herself off. “Do you- have a cat??”

Diego considers it. He still isn’t entirely sure if he wants to keep it after all.

“Yeah?” 

“Jesus Christ. Where did you get a cat?”

Diego shrugs, glances down at the cat. He feels weirdly defensive. 

“I found it in the dumpster. You better tell me what to do or I’m tossing it back in.”

“What!” Allison says, and it’s the most emotion he’s heard from her this entire phone call. “I swear to god, Two, you better not.”

“Do you have any idea what I should do with it?”

“Yeah, I guess. My friend Vera has a Bengal and she feeds it like rice and tuna and stuff. But dry cat food would probably be fine? I mean, it’s  _ food _ , right? Vera also gives Danny- that’s her cats’ name- massages and clothing. Oh! Once she dressed Danny up in this cat bathrobe after taking a bath and it was  _ so cute _ , except he scratched Vera like 2 minutes after.”

“Uhm,” he says once Allison stops. He does not think he’ll be giving the cat massages or clothing. 

“Do you at least have a name for it?”

“Uh.”

“Diego. Come on! Don’t name it something basic like Spot or Mittens. Name it something good. Delilah. Tiffany.”

Diego frowns. The cat has quieted down a little and is now staring up at him. Tentatively, he reaches a hand down to touch it. 

“Grace,” he says finally. 

“What? No, Diego, you can’t name it after  _ Mom. _ ”

“Why not? It’s a good name.” It  _ is _ a good name. Nice. Sensible. It reminds Diego of stormy weather with hot cocoa and sugar cookies, of floral perfume.

“It’s a granny name.”

“ _ Whatever, _ Allison. I have to go. It’s like, 4 am here.”

“Oh yeah, sorry. The time difference. Well, goodnight Diego.”

“Night, Allison.”

He names the cat Grace anyway, just to spite her. 

Life goes on. 

Diego beats up bad guys in the cover of darkness, harasses the police. He tears through red tape, breaks rules and bones, smirks at Patch and taunts, laughs, grins. He adds scars to his body like they’re collectibles, gunshot and stab wounds. He sets his mind on avoiding Eudora because last week she told him this whole “ _ crashing on my porch and creeping my roommates out”  _ thing wasn’t gonna work. 

He also feeds Grace twice a day. He spends a lot of money on her, too, because he did end up taking her to the vet for vaccinations and shit, and she deserves the good kind of food, not the cheap-o crap. 

He’s  _ attached _ . It’s only been 3 weeks. 

He brings her with him to COIN O RAMA at 5 am because he doesn’t like to leave her the gym at night, and he makes sure it’s too late for him to run into Vanya. She’s a good cat, and she sits patiently in his lap as he drives. He read an article sometime last year about someone who caused a 3 car accident cause their cat was loose in the car, but whatever. He’s Diego fucking Hargreeves, Number Two, the Kraken, and he’s a pretty good driver, even if he failed his first try at the test for his license. 

It’s a good night. He’s not running entirely off of adrenaline, and he managed to get away with nothing except a bruise on his left shin. His hands aren’t shaking, his chest doesn’t ache, Grace’s fur is soft, and everything is okay. 

Sort of. As good as it  _ can _ be. 

He’s the only one in the laundromat this time, and instead of shitty EDM, it’s silent. The radio’s missing and it smells like piss.

Grace is tucked into his jacket, head peeking out over the collar. She meows softly and Diego hums back, wrinkling his nose. 

“This place is grosser than it was last time.”

Yeah, he’s talking to his cat, but so what. She’s smart, she can probably understand him, and it’s not like there’s anyone to hear it. 

He’s piling his clothes into the washer when he realizes how fucking freaky the silence is. He can’t even hear the cars rushing by outside. It’s just him, Grace, the jangling of coins in his pocket, and the empty COIN O RAMA laundromat that’s fluorescent lighting and green hue looks like something out of a horror movie. 

Diego retrieves a knife from his holster and places it on top of the bench beside him because he can’t shove clothing into the washer and hold it at the same time, not really. 

He hums a few bars of the song by Bruno Mars that’s always on the radio nowadays and then quits. 

The bell above the door jingles. Diego turns to see who it is. 

Dark hair. Smudged eyeliner. Obnoxiously flamboyant clothing, red-rimmed eyes. It could be anyone but him, but here he is. 

“Klaus?”

It is silent in the laundromat. Diego stares at Klaus, and Klaus stares back. Diego doesn’t know why, of all laundromats, his siblings seem to be drawn to this one. 

Grace pokes her head over the collar of his jacket, paws at it. Meows lightly. 

“Diego-” Klaus starts, stepping forward. He laughs, loud and shocked. Diego doesn’t miss the fact that he has new tattoos- one on each hand- and there is blue glitter dusting his cheeks. “Is that- is that a  _ cat? _ ”

“So what,” Diego spits, and he can feel the anger boiling up inside of him. Can feel the helplessness of the house all over again. He thought Klaus was dead or gone like Ben and Five. It doesn’t  _ fit _ , doesn’t make  _ sense _ for Klaus to be standing here, laughing, when Diego has searched and worried and cried over him. 

Klaus takes another step forward, close enough to stick a finger towards her. He looks young, despite the beat-up-ness, eyes big and soft and startlingly green in the harsh lighting. 

“What’s her name?” Klaus whispers, voice feather-light, reaching up to pet her head. Diego wants to smack his hand away, but he doesn’t. He should.

“Grace,” he whispers back like it’s a secret. Diego watches as the edges of Klaus’s mouth turn upward, watches as he scratches Grace’s head softly. “I found her in a dumpster.”

(He does not tell Klaus that when he heard noise coming out of it, he had thought it was him.)

“I was looking for you,” He continues, and his words don’t trip over themselves, even if they want to. He pictures the words in his mind, in his mouth, the taste and shape and weight of them. 

“Oh,” Klaus mumbles, and he suddenly looks like he’s about to cry, but then he laughs, straightens, takes a step back. His hands are shaking, and his face is crumpled into something like guilt. “Sorry, I just came in here to pee. She’s cute, though. And I missed you.” Klaus hugs him, brief and tight. Wipes the space under his eye, grins wide enough for it to look painful. 

Diego waits. Grace keeps on meowing from inside his jacket, his laundry keeps spinning inside the washer, and he keeps waiting. Klaus doesn’t come back, and his throat starts to hurt in an about-to-cry way. His clothes stop spinning. The sun starts to rise. Grace keeps on meowing, and the light bulb above his head flickers. 

_ He thought he was dead. He thought he was dead, and he’s just lost him again. _

Diego gets back in his car. Drives back to the gym. Cards his hands through Grace’s fur, tries his best not to think. 

_ (Dead.) _

He punches the brick wall beside his sink hard enough to scare Grace bad enough she jumps, and the pain almost helps him forget. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do i know anything about cats? absolutely not.   
> Did this jump from crack to angst very quickly? yes.  
> do I care? yes because I tried and really like cats and angst and wanted to include them both  
> also diego is really out of character but in all fairness Vanya's book hasn't been published yet so i dont think he harbors as much hostility towards them yet and also he's like 21?? 22?? early 20's???? yeah anyway i hoped you liked it.   
> also the ending makes zero to little sense but it was dragging and im tired


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Diego takes the bus to the cemetery.

Diego takes the bus to the cemetery even though he owns a car. 

He knows he looks like a mess. His hair’s all stuck up and wild, and he’s wearing a parka zipped over that stupid t-shirt Klaus gave him for their birthday 6 years ago and a pair of jeans. The bouquet he’s got in his hand is small, ugly, but it was all he could afford, anyway, and it’s the thought that counts. 

He’s angry. _Fuck,_ he’s always angry. He misses having money. He misses having good food, misses air conditioning, misses the unity of being a part of something, misses Mom. 

He misses Ben. 

Ben died on a Tuesday in February. The elm tree in front of the academy had little green-white blossoms all over it, and that's about all Diego remembers about that day until it went to absolute shit. 

He left Grace at home curled up in her spot on the shelf above the sink, and he wishes he hadn’t. She’s a good cat. Smart. She never asks questions, never cries, never pushes. She’s soft and nice and doesn’t even scratch his ankles anymore. 

She doesn’t mourn on anniversaries. She doesn’t miss things she shouldn’t, doesn’t regret. 

Diego should really take her example. 

The person standing across from him on the bus eyes the bouquet, and Diego eyes them back. People stare a lot. It used to be because of the uniforms and fame, flashy car and commaning father, but now it’s just because Diego grew up to be a total mess, that his face and fingers and arms are littered with scars. 

He’s hungry. He should’ve eaten more than a piece of stale white bread for breakfast.

Eudora would scold him. Back when they were actually something, she would buy him coffee and an almond croissant once a week and Diego wouldn’t have to worry about paying her back. Back when they were actually something, Eudora would scold and smile and kiss him, hold his hand. But because Diego is a colossal fucking dickwad, he ruined that, just like he does everything else. 

(Eudora had turned 17 years old 2 days before Ben died. She had told him that she had cried through the entire funeral while watching it on TV, so hard she had to turn it off, and Diego had snapped at her and then gone out to beat bad guys up for 2 whole days.) 

He gets off the bus at the wrong stop, and his socks get soaked through his shoes from the snow as he walks. The flowers are already starting to droop in his hand, and Diego fiddles with them, wishing that they would perk up. His eyes ache, and as he reaches the gate of the cemetery, he stops. 

Ben has been dead for 7 years. Has been decomposing and rotting and lost and gone 84 months, for 365 weeks, 2555 days, hours, minutes, seconds. It is scary how time passes, scary how much Diego has forgotten. 

3 months after Ben died, that had been what he had been most scared of. _Forgetting_ . He used to repeat book titles and comic issues and mission numbers under his breath in order to not forget favorites, used to hoard that one issue of _Teen People_ that had Ben on the cover and the interview inside. 

The grave is in the back of the cemetery, and his feet are close to frozen by the time he reaches it. The headstone is dusted with ice, so he rubs it off with his hands, places the flowers underneath it. 

“Uh,” he stays, because that’s always what people do in movies. They always talk and apologize and cry, wax poetry about forgiveness and grief. Diego doesn’t think he’s that kind of guy, but he’ll try anyway. 

He rubs at his eyes, scratches his head. Examines the letters carved into stone, thinks of the statue back home. 

“Hi, I guess.” It seems like a good place to start. “Sorry for not coming here sooner.” 

He rubs his eyes again, harder. Sways a bit, then rights his footing so he doesn’t stumble.

“Diego?”

He turns, and Allison is standing there, in all her glory. She looks different, looks tall and professional and adult. He glances at the headstone, then back to her.  
“I thought you were in L.A.” 

“I’m here for the week.” 

“Oh,” Diego says, clenches his fist. It’s been years and years and years. He is still angry at her for leaving them all first. 

“Oh,” she says back, stepping forward. 

“How’s Hollywood?” he asks, turning back toward the grave. She joins him, wrings her hands, eyes the flowers. 

“Good.” Diego does not remember things between them ever being like this. “I just stopped filming.” 

Diego’s flowers look pathetic. He shouldn’t have come. Ben has been dead for 7 years, and corpses don’t want gifts or flowers or speeches. A corpse doesn’t want to hear Diego wallow, doesn’t want an apology. That’s the thing with being 6 feet underground.

The dead don’t want shit. 

Allison sighs, clears her throat. 

“How’s the cat?”

“Good.”

“Did you actually name her Grace?”

“Yeah.” 

Allison half-snorts, looks at him. Diego tries not to look back. 

It is scary how much has changed. How being removed from the only thing that brought them together makes them strangers, how it has been 7 whole years since he saw Allison in person, how she looks far more put together than Diego has ever been. 

“You could come and see her,” he starts, just loud enough to hear. “She’s a tabby, and she’s really soft. She might scratch you at first, but it doesn’t hurt that bad.”

“Diego,” Allison says, and her voice is soft around the edges, sorry. Diego wonders when she grew old, became mature. “I’m only here for the week.” 

He’s silly for this. For _wanting_. 

Silly for wishing. 

Silly for thinking that Allison would care. Allison, who has always been arrogant and cruel and self centered. Who has always gotten what she wanted, has never had to work hard at all. 

“It’s been 7 years,” he says, even though she knows. He is angry again. 

“It has.”

“You shouldn’t be here.” 

Two and Three were always the meanest. Everyone knew that.

“He was my brother, too, Diego.” 

He snorts.

“Yeah, whatever,” he tells her. 

When he leaves, he does not look back. 

It has been 7 years. Diego wishes he could forget. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season 2 is almost upon us!  
> I should be continuing this even after the season is out- the story is cannon compliant except for the cat, and I don't think there's anything that'll mess the story up.  
> Anyway, this chapter gave me a little bit of a hard time. It was all worth it though, because I'm pretty happy with the way it came out. Allison and Diego are definitely in my top three favorite umbrella academy characters, and I had a great time writing them!  
> 


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vanya publishes the book in June.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this ones a doozy!

Vanya publishes the book in June. 

Two weeks later, Diego gets stabbed. 

It’s not a first. It happened once when he was 13 and didn’t know to not get  _ too close _ , didn’t know that criminals and bank robbers and whatever-the-fucks could be faster than his siblings. 

He had nearly bled out, and Klaus had found him. Thought he was dead. Cried all over him, desperate and shaking and trying to push all the blood back into him, and Diego had held his hand for as long as he could stay conscious. He’d woken up in the infirmary, a new scar adorning his body, father above him, mouth stern. 

There is no infirmary this time. No bright light, no angry father. There’s Diego, leaned against a dumpster in an alleyway off of main street, pressing his hands to his abdomen to stop the bleeding. 

There’s Diego, trying to keep his eyes open, looking up at the stars, thinking of Vanya’s book. 

_ Damaged by his upbringing _ . 

It’s the only line he can remember right now. It’s the thing that hurts the most. 

He knows he’s angry. He knows that he was the cruelest, knows that sometimes he made Vanya cry. But he’s not  _ damaged, _ not helpless. Not vulnerable and broken, not some shattered-then-fixed china vase. 

He coughs. The pain is coming in waves now, white-hot and barbed, and he groans as he tries to stand. It didn’t hurt too bad at first, didn’t feel like anything, but by now, his hands are beginning to tremble, so he presses them against the wound harder to get them to stop. The blood is pooling around him, and his nose burns with the smell of it. 

“F-fuck,” he mutters, and for a second, his vision goes black.

He doesn’t know what to do. 

He might die here.

“Fuck,” he says again. It’s getting harder to keep his eyes open.

He misses Ben. 

(Ben, Ben, Ben. He loved the greek tragedies just as much as Diego had hated them. Loved Medea and Antigone enough to quote them, enough to sit up late with Allison and reenact the saddest parts.) 

As if their lives weren’t already big enough tragedies already.

Diego coughs again. He doesn’t want to die. Not yet, because dying means forgetting. Means giving up. Means damaged and broken and everything Vanya wrote him out to be. 

He needs to stop thinking. He needs to open his eyes. He needs to get out of here before all the blood in him runs out, before all that’s left of him is a corpse, a shitty boiler room, and a cat. 

Diego doesn’t want to die, so he reaches into his back pocket for his phone. His fingers are slick with blood, and he dials the number wrong at first. 

He fumbles the phone to his ear. 

“Patch,” he says when she does finally pick up. 

“Diego,” she says back, and it all hurts too much to say anything.

“Diego?” she asks, and he forces a ragged breath. She sounds worried now, scared. “What’s wrong?”

He can’t. He  _ can’t.  _ He doesn’t want to die. Not yet. Not yet, ‘cause dying means forgetting. (He doesn’t want to forget.) 

_ Eyes open, Diego _ .  _ It’s going to be okay. _

“I think I’m dying,” he tells her.

A beat. A pause, a standstill, a stutter. 

“Where?”

He tells her. His arms feel weak. 

“Don’t hang up,” she tells him. 

He does anyway. 

When Patch does finally find him, he’s shivering. She hauls him up, no matter how much Diego tells her to stop, stumbles with him to her car, and drives him to the hospital. 

He’s tired and cold, so he paws at the dials on the dashboard of her car to turn on the heat. 

“Stop,” she snaps, and her forehead is all wrinkled. He wants to smooth it out, to kiss the space in between her eyes. She turns on the heat anyway, just for him.

“I missed you,” Diego tells her, and she shakes her head. 

“Diego.”

“I did.”  _ He did. _

“You’re bleeding out. Hey!” She takes her hand off the wheel to snap twice in front of his face. “Stay awake, asshole. I need you to keep putting pressure on that. I’m not letting you die in my car.” 

“Okay.” He does not want to stay awake. He feels sick with the pain. 

“We’re close.”

“Eudora,” he says. His tongue is heavy. 

“Just- hold on.”

Okay. 

He does. 

She takes him to the hospital, and they stitch him up and send him home with painkillers and gauze. Patch fusses over him, drives him to the gym. On the way there she scolds him about being reckless, and he thanks her for picking him up. 

It hurts. He soldiers through it, because that’s the only thing he’s ever known to do, and when Patch asks him if that pain is bad, he shakes his head in a careful sort of way. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks him, and the wrinkle is still there.

He can’t believe he told her he missed her. 

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice is kind of raspy. He smiles at her, even if he knows it doesn’t look authentic. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

“You sure you’re gonna be okay on your own?”

He blinks. It’s a weird question for her to ask. 

“Yeah,” he says again. He feels numb,  _ drained _ , and it must be the meds, but Diego can’t help but feel like it’s that he’s run out of emotion. That getting stabbed somehow damaged his brain, and now he can’t feel anything at all. 

Whatever. Luther always used to say that he was paranoid. 

Patch drops him off at the gym, and he watches as her car pulls away then fumbles his way to the boiler room. Al eyes him as he does, one eyebrow quirked, then keeps yelling at the people in the ring. 

Grace greets him when he walks in. He feels guilty for being gone so long. 

“I got stabbed,” he tells her, and collapses onto his bed. “Nothing bad. It just bled a lot.” 

She meows, and Diego sighs, picking her up and placing her beside him. 

“I missed you,” he tells her, eyes closed, running a hand over her fur.

He’s tired. He wishes he had a copy of Medea. Grace is warm and soft, and Diego lets his eyes fall close. 

He missed a lot of things. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had a difficult time writing this one- even ended up splitting it up into two. I'm still working on the former second half, but I figured I'd post this in the meantime. 
> 
> I know absolutely nothing about stab wounds and medical stuff, so all of this is probably widely inaccurate. Sorry!
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! this is not edited at all!

4 days later, he goes to the mansion. 

Reginald is gone. Diego knows, because there was an article about it in the paper. Because he checked the driveway of the academy for the Rolls Royce. He brings a book of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ best works because he remembers Mom always liking one of his portraits. 

_ (“I wonder if she’s lonely.”) _

It has been 7 years since he left. 7 years since Ben died. 

Diego has always hated the number, anyway. 

It’s all to prove Vanya wrong. Because if Mom loves him, if she’s not just an extension of Hargreeves, that means that she was wrong about all the other shit, too. 

When he finally works up the courage to go and ring the doorbell, it’s Pogo who answers it. 

“Master Diego,” he says, and Diego shuffles his feet. 

“Is Mom here?” 

The door opens wider, and Diego steps inside. 

It’s colder than he remembers, and the ceiling is lower.

He wanders. He doesn’t know why. 

His bedroom is just as he left it. The books are still on the shelf, the dartboard still hung above his bed. The stack of fan mail is still in his desk drawer, along with Diego’s homework and essays written in carefully cultivated cursive. His nose burns with the smell of dust, and he wonders why Mom stopped cleaning in here. 

He looks for her in the mezzanine above the foyer, where the paintings are. Searches the halls, the stairways. He makes his way to the kitchen, and Pogo eyes him long and hard, huffs lightly through his nose. 

Mom is making cookies. She’s turned away from Diego, wearing the pink dress she always loved, humming something. She looks happy and normal, and he very suddenly wants to cry. 

“Mom?”

She turns around. She looks the same. Of course she does, she always has. 

“Diego!” she says, and her face lights up, mouth arranges itself into it’s perfect smile. 

He buries his face in her shoulder. She smells like sugar. 

“Oh, it’s been so long!” she says, and Diego let's go. “How are you?” Mom smiles again, wider, and Diego wonders if it ever hurts. 

“I’m good,” he murmurs, standing awkwardly next to the oven. Mom places a hand on his shoulder, and carefully guides him to a chair. “You?”

“Just fine. Now, would you like some cookies? Your brother should be home from his mission soon, but I suppose we can have some while we wait.”

“Mom,” he whispers, and he wishes he knew what to say. It scares him, how he reverts back to Number Two in the academy, how his stomach turns and aches and how familiar but foreign it all seems. 

The academy. He feels as if it might swallow him whole. 

“Now, sweetheart, there’s no need to fret.” Mom places a hand on his cheek, and he can vaguely hear the machinery inside her humming. “I’m glad you’re home.”

He’s not. 

“I shouldn’t have come.”

She frowns, and so Diego looks down to his hands. He feels as if he done something wrong. He missed her. He’s sick of  _ missing _ . 

“Is everything alright?”

His stab wound hurts, and he wants for Mom to hold him and not let go, to soothe all the aches and pains. To put band-aids over his bruises, to kiss them better just like she would when he was a kid. 

He’s too old for this. 

_ He shouldn’t have come.  _

“I brought something for you,” he says, placing the book of Ingres’s work onto the table. She picks it up, flips through the pages. “He painted the lady that you like. The lonely one.” 

“Oh,” she says. Her hand is still on his cheek, and he moves it away, clears his throat. 

“I just. Wanted you to have something.”

“Thank you, Diego. It can go on the table below her.” 

She looks happy now, cheerful. Diego wonders if Vanya was right. If it’s all just  _ him _ , just the excess things he couldn’t bother to do himself. 

“Do you-” he starts. Cuts himself off. “Do you ever hate him?” 

“Who, silly?”

“Dad.” 

The Monocle. Reginald Hargreeves. Klaus always liked to call him Reggie behind his back. There are a million names for him, but none of them do him justice. 

_ Asshole, dickhead. Monster.  _

“Now, Diego. Your father is a good man.”

“No,” he snaps, and his head is starting to hurt. He shouldn’t have come. It’s silly for him to be doing this. “No, he wasn’t. Mom-”

“Is everything all right, Diego?” she repeats. Her hands rest perfectly in her lap. “No!” he shouts, and it’s a little too loud. He pushes himself out of the chair, and it makes a scraping noise on the tile. 

“Diego, honey, we know it’s not nice to yell like that!” she scolds, stands up as well. “Tell me what this is about.” Her mouth is still fixed into a smile.

He feels heavy. Cold. He wonders if it was always like this when he lived here, and he just didn’t notice. Didn’t notice how the walls and floors and ceilings shrunk, how the air feels suffocating.

“Leave with me.” 

“You’re father doesn’t allow me off the grounds.”

“Please. He’s terrible to you. You have to know that.”

“Diego-”

“We can leave, Mom. I’ll- I’ll buy you an apartment and some new clothes and on the weekends you can go to the park and-. And the apartment will have an oven and washing machine so you can bake cookies and fold laundry, and you can dust the shelves there and- You have to feel  _ something _ . Please.”

He cuts himself off. He’s breathing hard, like he’d just been running. Mom’s face is held carefully blank. 

It is silent for a little too long. 

“Please,” he whispers. He wants her out. He  _ missed  _ her. 

“The cookies are ready,” she says finally.

Diego leaves without her. 

This house is a ghost. A painful memory. The same stairs that creaked when they were kids still do, the paint is still peeling in the same corners, and nothing has changed. 

He leaves the house without her, and he does not return for a very long time. 

He shouldn’t have come. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this is a weird place to leave off- but due to school and moving and stuff, I'm going to be away for 4 months starting in a couple of days, so I either had the choice to end it here or just not finish it at all. This chapter was very much "Oh, i need to finish this before I leave" and i'm sorry that is so evident. (side note- this and the majority of last chapter were all written today!) There are many things I wish I could have written about (mainly Diego and Luther) but sadly, this is all I could do. 
> 
> Anyway, thank you so much for reading! I had a terrific time writing this, and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Until next time!

**Author's Note:**

> This is all over the place because I wrote in the span of a week and did not bother to check if everything made sense together. Also, it's terribly long by my standards.


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